A review by Christian Detres
Memories of Overdevelopment explores the role trauma plays in life’s orchestra. The play casts this demon not in First Chair as a participant, but at the Conductor’s stand. It waves a wand of calamity at flinching communities of brass and string, stabbing at all members, lingering on the most unfortunate. The music that ensues is discordant, conflicting, at war with itself. Our drums of hope, violins of love, clarinets of kindness and charity, thrown into atonality by the indefatigable denominators of pain and abuse. If that’s a bit dramatic for you, understand Ms. Svich is pulling no punches. What could be a scream of frustration is instead a consistent muffled sob of reluctant resignation.
The play incorporates the documentarian’s studio, a nominal “safe” space for remembering and telling, as a de facto therapists’ chair and our static setting for the duration. Both actors in this two-person performance take turns playing the artist and the subject, one extracting stories of trauma and the other bleeding them. In these confessionals, each character explains their experience with fascism, invasion, autocracy, and emigration/displacement and more. It’s uncomfortable but don’t look away.
They are all terrors dealt with in very resonant, and very human, ways. Listening to the “survivors” put on a face of strength via denial and numbness is often almost too real. They excuse their complicity, confront their confusing comfort with tyranny, give up – in real time – and it is like watching a soul drown. This is hard stuff to watch. As it should be. It’s uncomfortable but don’t look away.
I won’t blunt the impact of the script by laying too much of it out here. If you’re brave, if you’re honest, this is required watching. The reflection of our persistently hamstrung and downcast humanity is clarion. It tells you what you already know but don’t want to admit. Anyone, of any political stripe, pessimist, optimist, faith-led or atheist, is served a very healthy portion of themselves. Its even-handedness is its sharpest blade.
Keaton Hillman and Katrinah Carol Lewis are given affable contemporary characters to set the premise of the work in action. Once they affect the roles of the affected however, they conjure the iceberg tips of PTSD in their physicality and defensive sarcasm, nihilism. There’s a certain pain signature in verbal confidence mixed with nervous hands that they both nailed. In fact, the performances get better and better throughout the hour-and-a-half long piece when you pick up on the harmony of grief, and the defiances to it, betrayed in their eyes and posture.
The set design emphasizes the point by giving us another dimension to view the actors in. The playback from the on-stage video camera, the documentarian’s conduit to “truth”, is displayed on the large screen backdrop. Hillman and Lewis speak directly into the camera lens and address the audience through it, larger than life, over their own shoulders. It’s used to chilling effect.
Theater is primal. It is a primitive and visceral artform whose ability to bend attention into emotions has remained potent for eons. Firehouse’s small, intimate, black box theater – which I imagine to be Richmond’s “off-Broadway” – gives honor to its power in this effort. I highly recommend it to the philosophers out there that think they’ve heard all sides to our story. Why we are the way we are. How deep in this mess are we? Where did we go wrong? Why do we say “this is fine” when it very, very, clearly isn’t? Go get challenged. This is worth it.
World Premiere
Memories of Overdevelopment
by Caridad Svich
February 7-25, 2024
Directed by Nathaniel Shaw
The New Theater at Firehouse
Buy tickets HERE
Photo by Chanan Greenblatt
